Not inferno
Hello from the limp beginnings of 2022,
My city is crawling with the virus and paranoia. Everyone has one or the other. Days now are mostly an agitation of exposure alerts, cancelled plans, and testy conversations about risk and ethics that zap the fun out of even simple joys. I’m starting to really hate the effort it takes to be carefree or whatever. I’d try to give up but what does that even mean in a pandemic? I mean, Jesus Christ. Can you believe we’re still here? I keep writing about death. People keep dying.
Sorry. This is not a very festive New Year’s greeting. These few weeks have just felt especially Groundhoggy and I’m finding it hard to slip into the linear, forward momentum of a new calendar year. I’m not actually depressed. It just all seems quite shit at the moment, doesn’t it? Like, it’s fine, genuinely, but also a little hellish? You get it. The virus and what it invokes — the other bogeymen (emphasis men) — that keep mutating, fading, and returning. Why do they keep doing this?
My colleague Dan Zak captured some of it in a story about “slouching” into 2022:
“The virus is adapting and so are we, becoming variants of our previous selves. Panic and bewilderment melt into fatalism. In the context of the pandemic, things are somehow both worse and never better. Get boosted, live your life, get the virus. Feel crappy, feel grateful, feel everything, feel nothing.”
It’s an invigorating read to pair, maybe, with this WNYC podcast on “Millennial Despair.”
Okay, no, sorry, I won’t just meander into your inbox and heave out sadness. I do that Mondays to Fridays for paying subscribers.
So, instead, I'll say that there’s an excerpt of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino that I’ve been turning over in my head recently that has helped with feeling less blegh. The book switches between short, poetic descriptions – guides – to imaginary cities, and a spacey conversation between the Mongol conqueror Kublai Khan and the Venetian traveler Marco Polo. I finished these concluding lines while waiting for coffee outdoors, my nose freshly swabbed from my second covid scare in three weeks. It was negative and I was relieved, but tired.
[Khan] said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”
And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Ah, alright, for the sake of the new year, for the sake of not giving up, let's do this. A not-inferno list:
Driving along the Rio Grande in New Mexico
Sitting on the carpeted steps of the Lincoln theater before a show, a glass of free Tequila in my belly and another glass spilled onto my shoes by a most funny, most real friend stretching her spine on the floor, talking aggressively about one of our favorite childhood subjects, which is: ourselves.
Lying on the couch with cramps and setting my Panda-shaped hot water bottle on my abdomen, then hearing Ruairi exclaim, wide-eyed, mouth agape, “what is that?” at my crotch, and realizing that my panda’s soft foot, which I had slipped just underneath by pajama pants so that my uterus area got maximum heat coverage, made me look uncannily like I had a penis, and laughing until my stomach started to cramp, effectively doubling my cramping
Opening presents
The notification that I got just now, seconds ago, that the Mayor is declaring a snow emergency tomorrow. It's snowing from 4am to noon — the children, dogs, and dads will be out at the park in full force.
What do you know? Making this list of thoughts ("make them endure, give them space") has made me feel more peacable inside my skin than I have in a while. I wonder if the exercise might for you too. Two other little offerings: This long rich interview with the late bell hooks that covers so much of the nuance in her approach to criticsm; and this cheesy Ted Talk by comedian and pop physicist Robin Ince about agency over pointlessness.
This email was written to the soothing singles of the musician Montell Fish. Finally, some pictures from New Mexico, specifically from the Blue Trail between Abq and Santa Fe, and from the Low Road to Taos:
With fluctuating optimism,
Reb
P/S: Depends on the state of the world but I'm scheduled to fly home on Jan. 28 for two weeks. Ruairi too. ☺️